This book uncovers how we make meaning of abstraction, both historically and in present times, and examines abstract images as a visual language. The contributors demonstrate that abstraction is not primarily an artistic phenomenon, but rather arises from human beings' desire to imagine, understand and communicate complex, ineffable concepts in fields ranging from fine art and philosophy to technologies of data visualization, from cartography and medicine to astronomy.

The coup attempt in 2016 emerged in the mid of a deep crisis. The efforts of the government to deal with the crisis by repressive means increasingly strained Turkey’s international reputation – which is crucial for the highly internationalised regulation of the Turkish economy. Nevertheless, AK Parti survived the coup attempt in July 2016. Employing a Gramscian understanding of hegemony and a Neogramscian approach on international relations, this chapter argues, that AK Parti survived the crisis and the coup attempt because there had been no alternative actor capable to politically organise bourgeois hegemony as AK Parti did it throughout the 2000’s. https://books.google.de/books?id=enm6DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de#v=onepage&q&f=false

GONÇALVES, Leandro Pereira. Plínio Salgado between Brazil and Portugal: Formation and transformation of Brazilian integralism. In: GALIMI, Valeria; GORI, Annarita. (Org.). Intellectuals in the Latin Space during the Era of Fascism: Crossing Borders. London and New York: Routledge, 2020, p. 85-106.

The article is concernig a massive semi-abandoned historical building, called the ‘Silos’, located in downtown Trieste (North-East Italy, on border area with Slovenia), few meters away the port and the central railwaystation, which constituted a gathering place for Jews and a reception centre for Italian exiles during WW2. Since 2014 Silos has become an informal shelter for refugees arriving via the Balkans: it is a useful place of anchorage and a free choice of ‘homing’ for migrants in transit. The ambivalence of this shelter is it serves as a protective and collective space, but also as a place where migrants are pushed back to the margins. Silos seems to be a porous filter that allows anchoring and mobility for refugees in the European threshold.

This book is the first synthesis of European military history in several decades, embracing the greater part of the continent and the Mediterranean shores. It draws upon a wide range of international literature and contains much new material. Routledge ISBN 9781138368989

This book explores the atmospheric dimensions of music and sound. With multidisciplinary insights from music studies, sound studies, philosophy and media studies, chapters investigate music and sound as shared environmental feelings. The contributions probe conceptual issues at the forefront of contemporary discussions on atmosphere and affect and extend the spatial and relational focus towards fundamentally temporal aspects of performance, process, timbre, resonance and immersion. Through examples from diverse musical traditions, the contributors pursue questions about music’s and sound’s capacity to imbue a situation with an ambient feeling and to modulate social collectives. In addition to original research, the volume features a first translation of an important text by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, and a debate on affect and atmosphere between the philosophers Jan Slaby and Brian Massumi. This novel contribution to the field of music research provides a strong theoretical framework, as well as vibrant case studies, which will be invaluable reading for scholars and students of music, sound, aesthetics, media, anthropology and contemporary philosophy.

In this contribution I analyse whether and how in Hong Kong’s case the move from one to another imagined community – from the British to the Chinese empire – has complicated the construction of a single historical narrative due to competing bottom-up and top-down initiatives to (re-)construct Hong Kong’s collective memory. I analyse the diachronic change of the collective memory especially but not exclusively as represented by initiatives to erect new or to transform already-existing memorials including, among others, the Cenotaph, the Sai Wan Bay War Cemetery memorial and the “Pillar of Shame” from 1945 to 1997/2017. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to a better understanding of the transformation of the political discourse in Hong Kong by using iconology to analyse Hong Kong’s collective memory and symbol politics.

The literature on the Venice Biennale has rarely addressed from a critical point of view the impact of the Italian politics on this institution and its structure. Reformed in 1932 by the Fascist dictatorship and controlled since then by the central government, still now-a-day the Venice Biennale depends from the political agenda of those parties governing the Democratic Republic of Italy. This essay aims to focus on two key years in the history of the institution, 1948 and 1968. In these dates, the political tensions among the major Italian parties determined a radical transformation in both the Biennale’s organisation and its artistic programme. Through the analysis of the politics of display employed in the 24th Venice Bienniale the first part of the essay [written by Stefano Collicelli Cagol] aims to unfold the influence on the Italian art historical discourse of the complex net of traumas, denials and reactions, which characterised Italy in its post-war years. Opened in 1948, the 24th edition was the first one since the end of the war and the collapsed of the Fascist dictatorship. Turning itself into a museum-like institution, the 1948 Biennial responded both to its uncomfortable recent Fascist past and to the international and Italian political turmoil of post 1945. The Biennale President, Giovanni Ponti – closely linked to the Christian Democratic Party at the time in government – invited some of the most prominent Italian art historians to define the artistic programme of the institution, setting a trend for the following twenty years. Avoiding an ideological reading of the works of art, the Biennale adopted a strategy of historicisation and de-politicisation of contemporary art display, strongly influenced by a pure-visibility approach on art. This approach lasted with different fortunes until 1973, when the events that unfolded around the Venice Biennale of 1968, forced the Italian Parliament to draft a new statute to replace the one in force, which dated from 1938. The new statute was the symbol of the cultural battle for all Italian institutions after the protest, consequently the Parliament left to the Biennale much autonomy and freedom justified by the particular social, political and cultural situation that followed ‘68. Under the aegis of Carlo Ripa di Meana, affiliated to the PSI – Socialist Italian Party, the rising new Italian political force of the 1980s, the Venice Biennale abandoned its festival structure to become an “institute of permanent culture”, openly ideological, participant in the social and political debate, a “public service”. Between 1974 and 1977, the new statute led to a model of cultural production and consumption that revolved around the political role of art, marking a departure in the traditional art historical framework characterising the institution since the Post-war years. The Biennale returned to the scene after ’68 with a theme-oriented exhibition format in line with the international new art practices expecting the start of an international debate and provided a test-bed for the new course of the PSI within the Italian politics. With the end of the 1970s, with their tensions and political engagement, the Bienniale further transformed itself to be aligned with the return to the private (stagione del riflusso), a return to a more hedonistic and disengaged period lasting through the 1980s and proposing since 1978 a series of thematic exhibitions with an art historical approach, thus merging the two critical models here analysed and developed by the institution since 1948.